“We need to go faster,” Sverl snapped, abruptly knocking Bsorol’s claw away and turning on some of the hardware embedded in his ceramal skeleton. The grav-motor worked against surrounding matter in the same way as Riss’s motive power and shoved Sverl forwards. His accompanying children hurried to catch up and remain in a protective formation about him. As he travelled, he continually scanned and weaned data from his surroundings, and found himself necessarily altering the schematic in his mind.
The station had undergone many changes over the last century. Semi-sentient technology had turned large areas into those strange worm casts, and tangles of tentacles were sprouting everywhere—their pod-like fruit ready to disgorge strange insectile seeds. Wild nano- and microtech growths crusted many surfaces, and extra tunnels snaked haphazardly through the structure, lined with fused detritus as if made by some giant burrowing beetle. It was as if the AIs here had devolved into the very fauna and flora from which some of their programming and physical characteristics derived.
Soon reaching the end of the assembly tube, they came to a wide portal leading into an area tangled with strangely overgrown machinery. Sverl identified handler robots resembling steel bastardizations of the human’s god Kali. Maglev routing tubes were wrapped around with those other worm tubes. Dangling on thick threads of optic and power cables Sverl noted the glittery-eyed heads of hardfield conveyors, giant hydraulic arms and spider constructors. Large masses of coagulated wreckage and unused ship components were mounded up in some spaces or were drifting to the slow tidal pull of the hypergiant. Even deep within the station, the glare of that immense sun managed to penetrate; rather than needing to illuminate his surroundings, Sverl found it necessary to filter out the light.
Through a narrow channel, Sverl could see the edge of an octagonal runcible cargo portal, which he estimated to be a quarter of a mile across. This was where they had brought in pre-manufactured components. The area had been used for some assembly work, but components were mostly routed to mini-factories spread through the station. If anything was active in here, it would probably be perilous. But the place was dead. He propelled himself in.
Drifting down the channel to the runcible portal, Sverl checked the schematic again. Had the portal been working, its meniscus would have obstructed the way, and this would not have been an ideal route. However, this runcible, like all such within this station, was dead too.
“We didn’t do this,” said Bsorol, waving a claw at the surrounding devastation and snaking burrows.
No, the prador attack had not caused the damage here. It had been caused by AIs fighting inside the station, and the subsequent rebuilding by distorted minds and technology gone insane. Sverl began to note further strange anomalies: construction robots wound together in death grips, other robots half melted and stuck to the superstructure. One of the umbilici manipulators had a mummified human corpse in a space suit impaled on one limb. As they drew closer, the sights grew increasingly strange—further evidence of technology run riot. Robots lay tangled in vine-like growths sprouting from the walls. Strange crystalline growths issued from one of the big handler robots like some parasitic fungus. And another human corpse, with just the helmeted skull and one arm visible, lay embedded in solid metal. Spikes of glassy metal protruded from otherwise empty eye sockets.
They passed through the inactive runcible into the next receiving area. Here, Sverl detected a submind surviving in the runcible control mechanism. It was singing the same atonal song to itself over and over again. And it gave no response at all to Sverl’s probe.
“Them bones them bones them dry bones,” it sang.
Sverl shivered and was glad to be moving away from it.
At the end of this area, a growth resembling metallic lichen blocked the route leading towards the Room 101 AI. Sverl could see movement on it and, scanning closer, observed microbots slowly and meticulously building this thing. They were working like ants but with metal rather than organic matter—slicing it from a nearby collection of bubble-metal beams and working it into interlocking puzzle pieces before bringing them over and inserting them into place. There was order here, but no reason. As far as Sverl could tell, the structure they were building served no purpose at all. He estimated it would take them about two billion years to chew up the entire station.
“Burn a way through,” he instructed his children.
Bsorol and Bsectil moved forwards and opened fire, their beams converging on the mass and spiralling outwards. Metal vapour exploded out, white-hot, then rapidly cooling as it reached them. It left threadlike metallic crystalline growths on their armour. It took them some minutes and they even had to use their impellers to hold position—the thrust from the particle beams pushing them back. Finally, they cut through and made a wide enough hole. With a brief mental command, Sverl ordered one of his war drones through first. Bsorol followed with a couple of second-children in tow.
“Clear,” he said.
Sverl went after them, feeling uncomfortable about having wrecked what was perhaps a century of work by those microbots. Was that human guilt at kicking over a termite mound? It certainly wasn’t something a prador would feel.
On his internal map—that schematic—the tunnel was straight. But once inside it, he saw it turned sharply to the right and curved upwards. Scanning ahead, he saw the tunnel distorted into an almost perfect spiral. This was just like the work of those microbots: order and organization to seemingly no purpose. Feeling slightly baffled and rather claustrophobic in the constricted space, he followed his first-children along the winding course. Soon he began to see that more was involved than the pointless distortion of the station structure. Embedded in the walls were Golem, occasional maintenance robots and, in one case, another human corpse. Maybe this was the result of some sort of trap, so he checked his surroundings for anything still active, but all he found were near-somnolent patches of nanotech. However, those things set in the walls appeared with meticulous regularity, with any limbs arranged just so. Was this art?
Beyond the end of the tunnel, things returned to what you might expect around an assembly plant. It was as if some intelligence had managed to create an enclave of sanity. However, Sverl could detect nothing active in the vicinity. Beyond this zone, things became even more Byzantine than before. The station structure had been severely distorted, so that what lay ahead resembled a jungle of tree limbs up to a yard wide. They were all formed of compressed and twisted metals, plastics and composites. Deep inside this—seemingly the seed from which it all grew—rested a pill-shaped container a quarter of a mile across. Despite the strange protruding connections, Sverl still recognized it—the armoured abode of the Room 101 AI. With a feeling almost of dread, he advanced towards it.
CVORN
The infection that had lost Cvorn one of his newly installed palp eyes was gone. But now his other palp eye was completely blind and beginning to sag. Diagnostics had revealed that the steady transformation of the young adult’s genome in those eyes by antejects had failed because of his own immune response to those same compounds. No matter—the palp eyes weren’t critical. Fortunately, a localized mutation of his own genome caused this, and did not extend to his nether regions. His body was steadily incorporating his new sexual organs. However, as he nibbled at pieces of jellied mudfish and washed them down with chasers of the foul-tasting stomach remedy, he wondered if his insides would ever return to normal.
Cvorn turned his attention back to the steadily expanding ship’s schematic on his screens. Sfolk had still managed to evade the ship’s security drones, so Cvorn had decided that the only remedy was a complete review of the altered schematic. To this end, his children were out with scanners. They were working their way through the ship, transmitting data directly back to him. This laborious manual method was the only reliable way of getting what he needed, as the ship’s system was completely in thrall to this false schematic. But the new schematic would not be ready before he reached the coordinates where his old destroyer had been annihilated.
Cvorn again checked the data on that incident and again found it frustratingly inconclusive. The second-child had kept the transmission open and plenty of data was available, but it still wasn’t clear what had fired on the destroyer. The destroyer’s sensors had detected Sverl’s ship, but at some considerable distance from its own arrival point. They had then perceived objects swinging round the red dwarf, but these were cloaked in a haze of EMR, and before identification was possible an energy surge occurred and the transmission ended.
Did Sverl have allies? Cvorn could think of no being, either prador or Polity, who might assume such a role. But regardless, he had taken precautions . . .
Cvorn stared at his screens, noting a small warning scrolling in one of them. The second-children must have discovered yet another part of the ship that hadn’t been there on the schematic. They’d already picked up a tunnel leading from this very sanctum to a grating two corridors away to which Sfolk must have cut the fixings. This was now blocked and the grating welded down. But it was vexing to find this so near . . . Cvorn abruptly did a double take. No, this new warning signalled something else entirely. This actually told him that some cams had gone offline towards the nose of the ship—cams in a corridor adjacent to an armoury.
“Security Drones Four and Seven head to these coordinates,” he instructed, in his excitement briefly losing control of his ability to aug them the instruction or coordinates. He waited, champing his mandibles, then inadvertently regurgitated a chunk of jellied mudfish. His ailments seemed determined to remind him of their presence. He swallowed, tried to remain calm, then sent the coordinates—simultaneously bringing up sensor feeds from the drones on two of his screens.
SD4 was the first to arrive on the scene, rounding a curve in the corridor next to where one of the cams was offline. The drone’s image feed briefly showed what lay ahead. Then the perspective shot up to the ceiling, before disappearing in a bright flash. A second later Cvorn heard the distant explosion and felt the rumble through the ship.
“All drones converge on the coordinates of Drones Four and Seven!” he instructed. “Beware mines!” Next, he ran a replay of what the drone had seen. He saw a prador in the armour of a large first-child, slicing through the door into the armoury with a green-output quantum cascade laser.
Not so smart
, he thought before panicking again, and belatedly checking on the contents of that armoury. It contained hand-held particle cannons, Gatling guns, missile launchers and a wide selection of explosives. With such weaponry, an armoured prador could wreak a great deal of havoc. But still, breaking in there seemed a foolish move. No matter how much havoc Sfolk caused, he would never get away from there—the security drones were just seconds away.
Now came the feed from SD7 as it slowed before the cam black spot. It framed an object stuck to the wall just above the floor and just below the ostensibly malfunctioning cam. Before Cvorn could issue instructions, the area in sight filled with metal flinders from Gatling fire and the mine detonated, taking out one wall of the corridor and part of the floor. Though he was aware that these drones contained second-child ganglions and could therefore think for themselves, he still said, “Get in fast and kill him.”
“Understood, Father,” replied the drone, rounding a smoke-filled corner and entering the stretch of tunnel Sfolk had previously occupied. At the far end, Cvorn glimpsed the remains of the other drone lying in burning wreckage. Sfolk must have used a planar explosive mine to cut the thing in half.
SD7 reached the doorway into the armoury—which was still smoking around its edges, with the door lying on the floor inside. The drone entered fast, swerved left then up and to the right. Cvorn caught one glimpse of a line scoring across a wall, spilling molten metal. More feeds opened up on Cvorn’s screens as the other drones started to arrive, then another of them blinked out. It was all too chaotic to absorb and would require decoding in his aug, which he wasn’t capable of right then. Abruptly he backed off his saddle, turned and headed for the sanctum door, retaining enough control to signal it to open ahead of him. There he paused for a second, considering bringing his blanks with him, but knew he wouldn’t have much control over them either.
“Vlox!” he called, routing that and his imperative clattering to the PA system. “You and armed children to me now!”
Four second-children clad in armour came at a run, skidding round the curve at the end of this tunnel, brandishing Gatling guns and particle cannons. They had been on station while the others were mapping the ship, just in case they uncovered Sfolk’s hideaway. Vlox came running after, unarmoured but now bearing a single-barrelled weapon. This was specifically designed to punch through prador armour and explode inside it. Cvorn liked that his new first-child was keeping on top of events and was thinking ahead. Vlox might even survive in his post for as long as Vrom.
“Come!” he said peremptorily, and set off.
Two of the second-children shot forward, tipping sideways and running along the curve of the tunnel wall to get past Cvorn’s bulk and settle in ahead. They soon reached a branch in the tunnel and headed right, following its curve down—already aware of where Cvorn wanted to go. Meanwhile, Cvorn managed to control himself enough to get imagery back from the drones’ cams. The armoury was now full of smoke, the green laser stabbing through it and signalling its source. The drones were targeting this with careful particle cannon shots. Cvorn felt briefly angry. Why weren’t they opening up with everything they had? Then he remembered just how dangerous it would be to do so at that location. This was quickly confirmed, as a further blast knocked out two cam views—but another showed Sfolk tumbling in a cloud of fire.
Very quickly, they drew closer to the sounds of conflict. Judging by the cam feeds, Cvorn reckoned Sfolk had realized he was finished, so now fought without regard for his own safety. One of the drones that the blast had knocked down had just recovered when the young adult leapt onto it. Another explosion ensued and Cvorn lost not only the cam feed from that drone but all other feeds too. Sfolk had destroyed the drone; Cvorn reckoned he had used the methods of a particularly feared human fighter during the war and had stuck a mine on the thing. Cvorn slowed down. Perhaps his impulse to rush down here to be in at the kill hadn’t been a great idea. Vlox took this opportunity to get past him and join the two second-children just as they reached the edge of the cam black spot. Together, they rounded the curve into the conflict zone.